Starting Over Bad Habits
by a starr in photo
Summary: Eliot knows what its like to kill people, he knows you can never wash that blood off your hands. So when he offers, it means something. Eliot/Parker  Kind of one-sided, but not really


A/N: Sorry The Parts We Play is coming along so slowly, I write most of it in class, and I've had exams the past while. It's in progress though, will be up before the end of the week. To tide you over, here's this.

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><p>Eliot could remember every name, and every face of every person that he had killed. He had gone out of his way to learn names, in the incidents in which he didn't know them before. And they haunted him. Nobody questioned the little black book he kept, because it was easier to assume that it was filled with one night stands and call girls, rather than the information about each of his victims. What he had done for Damien Moreau, he would never be able to scrub himself clean of that, and honestly, he didn't want to.<p>

Eliot had come to learn that nobody actually deserved to die, there were bad people in the world, wolves. There were horrible serial killers, and those who did just as much evil much less directly, but nobody deserved to die. Rotting in hell was one thing, but he had learned that he was in no place to play god. Eliot had no right to take away someone's life.

So he deserved the nightmares, and the torment. He subjected himself to it, he recited every name before he fell into his fitful sleep, and every morning he recited their names again. Without fail, every time.

He couldn't remember when he had come to that realization, but he wasn't sure it really mattered. It was in the past, and he couldn't change what had happened, but at some point he decided that he'd do everything in his power to never have to kill again. His body had been trained, honed as a killing machine. His reflexes were to snap necks, slice jugulars, sever carotid arteries.

But he retrained himself, spent three years in Japan with an Aikido master; he learned meditation. After that he moved to China, and spent two years in a Buddhist monastery and perfected his techniques. No longer was his body trained to kill, but he knew a thousand and one ways to disarm a person, he learned joint locks and pins, learned how to knock people out without doing serious damage. And sometimes, with serious but not life threatening damage.

He had learned to tame his rage, and his anger. He learned to control himself, and he would never go back to the way he had been before. That was a certainty. He stopped taking jobs as a hired gun, and focused again on retrieving, the way it had been just out of the Navy. He left behind bodies, but not corpses and though he couldn't wash his hands of his sins, his soul had felt lighter.

And that lightness had only grown exponentially when he joined the Leverage team, because this time it was different. Different than what he had done for Moreau, different what he had done after, and different from even what he had been doing in the Navy. Now he could help people without casualties. There didn't have to be bodies, the job didn't call for it. Nate was one of the good guys, a genuinely good guy, he'd never allow for the bodies.

And then he had met Parker, the blond sprite that tried at his patients and swirled around him like a tornado, lifting all of his possessions away from him if he didn't cling tightly enough. And he could feel that long suppressed rage bubbling beneath the surface. And it was difficult to just be around her sometimes, and Eliot was sure that the team just assumed that she annoyed him. And that was partly true, but mostly not.

Because when he looked at her, he saw himself, and he saw what she was. A victim of circumstance, exploited by everything that appeared to be good in her life. She had been dealt one harsh blow after another, and it wasn't fair. And yes, Eliot understood that life wasn't fair, but it didn't make it any easier to deal with. And every time he looked at her he saw exactly what she could have become, a happy twenty something year old, with a job and friends, maybe a husband and maybe even children, because Parker always seemed to like them so much.

She could have been happy, and Eliot wanted that for her, wanted that for himself. But it was too late. For both of them, and he really just couldn't live with that. And so his blood simmered.

But then that asshole, the complete scumbag, as far as Eliot concerned, that fraud psychic had gone and dragged up pieces of Parker's past that she had never wanted uncovered, that she had never shared. And he made her cry. She had buried it somewhere deep, and Eliot knew exactly what that was like, and he more so than the rest of the team understood just how much she wanted him dead.

And then she had gone and outright asked for it, asked if they could kill him. And Eliot wanted to. For the first time in years he had let himself feel that rage, the consuming fire that made his skin hurt and his muscles itch and he wanted absolutely nothing more than to hang the fraud upside down and slice him open like a pig for slaughter. But he couldn't be that person anymore, couldn't let them see his rage, but he had to put it out there, had to let her know that if she asked, if she really meant it, he would do it for her.

"Well, yeah, I mean," all he managed to stutter out, trying to suppress his anger, because he wasn't mad at them, and it was easy enough to confuse.

But he would. For all the nights spent reminding himself of the people he had killed, the countless hours wallowing in guilt, metaphorically drowning himself in their deaths. If that was what she wanted, if she wanted the man dead, truly and honestly, Eliot would kill him, and he wouldn't look back. He knew exactly what it felt like, he knew how he would take it, and knew that he would survive. The way he always had.

But if Parker wanted the man dead, and if Eliot didn't step in, she'd do it herself, he was sure of that. And it would ruin her, because despite all of her short comings, and all of the crappy hands that had been dealt to her, she was a good person, with a pure soul untainted by the blood of murder the way he was. And even if she thought herself guilty for her brother's accident, it was nothing compared to feeling the life leave someone's body, and the knowledge that you had caused that.

He wouldn't. He couldn't let her feel that ever. And he'd do anything and everything in his power to make sure she didn't. It didn't matter that he couldn't have her the way he wanted her, because he loved her. He'd kill for her. And Eliot? He knew exactly what that meant.


End file.
